Understories Thrive on Loss: On Katy E. Ellis’ Forty Bouts in the Wilderness

Forty Bouts in the Wilderness
Katy E. Ellis
MoonPath Press, 2024

In the Indigenous Tla-o-qui-aht dialect of the Pacific Northwest, there is no word for wilderness. The closest that tribal elders can come to approaching a translation of this concept into language is the word wałyu, meaning home.

In the context of Katy E. Ellis’ rich poetry collection titled Forty Bouts in the Wilderness, “wilderness” can be read as the state of being outcast, un-enfolded, lost, and, in many ways, homeless. There is also in it the bewilderment that accompanies absolute rejection and alienation. In describing the nonce form of the collection, Ellis is specific about her use of the word “bout” to represent a defined timeframe as well as a struggle. And while her experience of wilderness is personal, it is never possessive. The wilderness she is thrown into is hers to respond to, but not hers to control, and she recognizes this by calling it “the” wilderness, not “my” wilderness.

Readers are led into this wilderness after Ellis answers “to a forgotten name” and returns to the religious family who once cast her out. The family’s patriarch lies near-death in a hospital that is also a wilderness to the poet, tainted as it is by familial amnesia; her siblings behaving as if they had never shunned her; as if her years of being outcast had never existed; her brothers, “like two kind police officers,” escorting her to their father’s bedside. “When had they last held me in their love?” she wonders, as the strangeness of return causes her to question her own exile:

Did I choose to be lost
—to snake my way
through no-man’s land?

Adding to the layers, in “Bout 13,” Ellis shows how this isolation stems from a personal act of resistance:

Over half my life ago,
I asked the churchmen how
they knew their God was mine.

The title poem of this collection is an inventive suite of forty “bouts,” each a collection of tercets foot-noted by prose poems that give clues to the underlying narrative. Used differently, the prose poems could be considered merely expository, but, in this case, the exposition deftly intensifies the tercets, allowing the reader to hear the unspoken, to visualize the tattered edges of the fragments and the tableau from which they have been torn, to guess at the missing pieces and what their absences might represent. In chimeric fashion, the poet’s bewilderment continues through the father’s critical illness. The reader watches as the father speaks “with a bear’s voice/ from a cave we cannot enter,” and Ellis can only imagine the damage to his brain.

This section bears witness to the father’s decline while being haunted by the many questions that accompany the poet’s expulsion from her family. “Understories thrive on loss . . . The vegetation of my childhood, for example, stunted by a thick canopy of churchmen, continued to grow past my shunning.” And later, “Yes, there’s danger in the understory. And grown men who have cried rivers of wolves. . .” Here, thoughts of death and family also prompt Ellis to mourn afresh the two children she miscarried. Typically, the loss of a child would cause bereaved parents to turn to their families for comfort. But Ellis is cut off and bound by her forced/chosen exile. In the bookend to “Bout 21,” Ellis paints this moment:

“Sensing my distress, I remember my mother and my sisters at that time. They stood in a nearby pasture, bleating mournfully across the strong budding vines of pink-red climbing roses that enveloped the low, fieldstone wall I’d built between us.”

The push and pull of conflict winds taut the very budding vines that tempt with their promise of comfort, so strong is the under-image of the barricading thorns concealed by the foliage. The mind roils at the passive captivity of the mother and sisters; the sense of longing and lost love; the wall the poet herself has built, the wall that brings us back to the reason for the poet’s exile–the “bleating” cries of those imprisoned by fences of “churchmen” and the seeming impossibility of a reconciliation not littered with obstacles.

Two further sections, Pilgrim’s Pace and [Re]turnings, round out the collection. In the former, we see the poet searching for belonging and connection, wandering the world while healing her wounds and probing her own self-doubt and guilt. “You are here/ because you don’t know where else to be,” she writes in the poem “Signs for Leaving,” even though “You know there’s nothing here / to feed your broken houses.” Often, Ellis’s searching seems to be guided, whether consciously or not, by her religious upbringing: seeking miracles in Fatima and saints in Jacinta. In one of my favourite poems, “When I Was a New Excommunicant,” Ellis highlights the conflict of longing “to sing the kyrie again / and feel my sister staring at my hair with plans / to curl it special for the next Divine Service . . . in the time I used to want their forgiveness.” Here, I was reminded of Educated by Tara Westover, in which the also-excommunicated author—despite the abuse she suffered at home, followed by years of university studies and a deep understanding of the false narrative she’d been fed by her fire-and-brimstone father—experiences the continual conflict of longing to return to the family fold.

In part three, [Re]turnings, Ellis at first flows away from poems of the self, now grounded by motherhood and the central focus of her new family, into explorations of gravity, space and other lands–“changing dollars for tokens to conquer / ghosts that threaten our yellow video-globe lives.” But, as the title of the section suggests, she circles back to the beginning with “Bouts Under Sky,” in which she divines the wellspring of her conflict:

My human father is the other
god I worshipped
before the first Thou Shalt Not.

Here, she finally demonstrates her fission from the religion of her upbringing by stating that she teaches her daughter “to call God out in the forest, receive/ pieces of sky and falling sun.” Despite the scarring of connective tissue caused by such fission, the separation only fully falls into place when she pries “fear from between curled toes,” to “mark both sole and soul” and “earth into place,” in the final poem, “Here”.

Despite landing in the present with a newfound sense of belonging, Forty Bouts in the Wilderness haunts the reader with the profound effects of familial rejection. In exile, all supports are pulled away; there is no magnetic north or south on which to rely. As Ellis feels her way through this wilderness to build a new life with her partner and child, the reader senses that the present will gradually eclipse the past even as the anomalies of exile may always shadow her life.